Brett Favre is America

​Like about 130,000 other people, City Pages went to the fair yesterday. We saw the miracle of life, St. Paul's K9 cop show, and ate a ridiculous amount of... cheese curds, Sweet Martha's cookies, chocolate covered bacon, corn on the cob, Kiwanis Famous Malts, and Tiny Tim's mini-doughnuts. In the middle of this calorie coma, while staring at men and women adorned in brand new #4 jerseys, we had an epiphany: Brett Favre is not just the quarterback of the Vikings. Brett Favre is America.Reason number #1: He is both the best and worst at something, simultaneously.

Think about it. Favre holds the record for most touchdown passes, 464 and counting. This makes him one of the very best at scoring points, critical for winning football games (duh). But he also holds the record for the most interceptions thrown, 310 and counting. This makes him one of the very best at losing possession of the football, a critical element in losing football games (again, duh).

But when most sports fans try to compute the two in their heads, the touchdowns cancel out the interceptions in their brains. So when coaches look at Favre, they see an offensive machine, a little old, but solid like a diesel engine. What they don't see is the other Favre, the one that breaks down regularly, like for example, a turbo-charged diesel engine.

America is just the same:

We have some of the very best public schools: Berkeley, University of Washington, University of Texas at Austin. And some of the worst: peek into any public school in Cleveland.

We have the greatest military capabilities on the planet. We aren't exactly the best, nor the brightest at using it. See: Vietnam, Iraq, and just maybe, Afghanistan.

We have abundant access to food, clean water and milkshakes. We abuse this power to the nth degree. (Didn't realize there was so many people at the fair tipping the scales past 300lbs.)

And when Americans try to compute this in their heads, the good cancels out the bad... even if the bad is the very worst. And that's really what makes America awesome, because we know that awesome is more rad than anything bogus.

And that's why Brett Favre is America. He is a walking embodiment of all that is right and all that is wrong.

(And no matter how much we love him in purple, deep down, he'll always be a Packer.)